I enjoyed this quite a bit, but I don't really know what the point of it was in the end. Some chapters are largely about the way people talk about Shakespeare plays with almost no relationship with the text (Romeo & Juliet, Macbeth) and others are about modern interpretations of Shakespeare (The Tempest, King Lear). ( )

The chapters are pure Marjorie Garber, intelligent and widely read and wide-ranging. If you’re looking for a coherent thesis about any of the plays, methodically explored, you won’t find it here, but you will find a bunch of neat points about how the plays have been received, used, and interpreted over time. Here’s what she covers: The Tempest, especially as the play has been interpreted with reference to colonialism, racism, and gender—is Prospero a hero or a villain? Romeo and Juliet and youth, including the cultural reinterpretation of a “Romeo” to mean an inconstant, indiscriminate lover, rather than the boy in the play who dies for love. Coriolanus and the self who chooses to participate in, or absent itself from, political engagement with others. Macbeth and the necessary difficulties of interpretation, the riddles of the play turning into riddles about the play and Lady MacBeth, like Romeo, losing her grounding in the specifics of the play and turning into a slur applied to any ambitious woman. Richard III and the challenge of fact: Richard tells the audience of his own interiority, but howdo we know what was true of Richard, and why and in what ways do we debate whether Shakespeare’s Richard was “real”? The Merchant of Venice, anti-Semitism, and intention: was Shakespeare an anti-Semite or a man ahead of his time and place in writing Shylock as something other than a stereotypical villain, given how many ways the play has been performed in the service of anti-Semitism and of recuperation? Othello: how did Iago’s conniving words about reputation, uttered in bad faith, come to be understood as important truth (as many of Shakespeare’s phrases said by people who are figures of fun or evil in the text are), and who gets to play Othello in the context of racism and the extensive historical debate about how black Othello really was? (This was probably the least coherent chapter, but they’re all, um, wandering.) Henry V as exemplar of leadership, as shown by his repeated presence in business texts—even though the play itself ends by telling us that his victories were quickly dissipated by his early death. Hamlet and the problem of “character,” including interpreters’ tendency to see themselves in Hamlet and Hamlet in themselves. (My favorite, because Hamlet’s my favorite.) King Lear and its rise to outpace Hamlet as indicator of the despair of the modern condition (as opposed to the modern character). ( )

Excellent combination of shakespearean criticism and American studies. ( )